Why historic snow doesn’t mean climate change is a myth

It’s been snowing in the Eastern United States like nobody’s business. Crazy, wild cold and snowstorms.

Predicting the weather might be hard, but predicting that extreme cold weather will produce a lot of hot air from climate deniers is easy. In fact, the number of myths floating around about climate change is pretty extensive, and I thought it might be helpful to address them, one by one, over the course of the year.

For today, though, snow and cold are on people’s minds. And that means plenty of people saying that this is strong evidence, if not downright proof, that the planet is not heating up.

There’s an elegant, if not complete, counterargument that comes via MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Tracker, one of my favorite daily blog reads. I’ll let you read it all here, but to boil it down to its chilly essence:

Within the global context, these snowstorms mean nothing. Even if the entire United States, including Alaska, were blanketed with unseasonable cold (not here in California, that’s for sure) or snow (could we just get a few raindrops, maybe?), that would amount to about 2% of the planet’s surface.

Enjoy the lucid explanation. And then feel free to leave your comments, including anything that you think of as additional evidence that global warming is a sham. I’ll address those in future blog posts, and I promise to be fair and to stick to the science.

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